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Tuesday, October 4

343 worried that people will hold them to a high standard. So what!

The peeps at 343 have been chatting with OXM and one of them appears to be a little scared of a little scrutiny. I think he forgot one thing - Bungie had an established track record of producing quality games - and this was before Combat Evolved changed the world forever - 343 Industries so far has not released a second of game to the retail market. Not a second. Hence you HAVE to expect their will be scrutiny.

Here's some lines from an OXM article with Kik Wolfkill (that is an awesome name!) and Frankie on whose shoulders the entire franchise is resting on.

"Our goal is an amazing Halo game," creative director Kiki Wolfkill told OXM during an interview you'll read in our Halo Limited Edition Special, on sale now. "People looking back will probably be able to say: 'this is the flavour that 343 added' in relation to the games that came before."

"We'll come under a lot more scrutiny than Bungie did, even though their teams shift monumentally between games," O'Connor added. "There's definitely core people still there, but other than that vastly different people worked on each game. There'll be differences in style that will be attributed to 343 that wouldn't have been examined under the same microscope if it had been another Bungie team doing it.

Others said:

"You get that between levels in a game - level 2 in Halo 3 is different to level 3 because slightly different pockets of the team are working on it. There's little subtle things that we'll be held to an exacting standard for, that would have happened anyway. But there will be 343 elements and there will be core Halo principles."

"For the team, I think finding that balance has been one of our biggest challenges: how do we push new ideas, whilst continuing to respect the legacy. In terms of specifics, we're still pretty tight-lipped about what we're doing."

"There's a lot of things Call of Duty does beautifully that we should do better," O'Connor told OXM last month.

Frankie O'Connor has also revealed that the Halo 4 team isn't afraid to tamper with Halo's fiction, asserting that "the game is the king". Master Chief has changed a little in the time since Halo 3, with modified armour and new "behaviours".

Cortana's advancing age will play a key role in the new Reclaimer trilogy - according to series lore, older AIs experience a condition known as Rampancy, short-handed by O'Connor as "thinking itself to death".